At some point in an encyclopedia's lifetime, it's "complete enough" that you'll see an excess of authors. "Compiling the world's information" and, past that, "compiling current events as they happen" (with a side of "occasionally improving/updating old articles") need very different numbers of authors.
What I'm trying to communicate is that Wikimedia has challenges, possibly exacerbated by Google's behaviour, but the challenges are not money. Wikimedia is not a for-profit corporation, it's a non-profit with a mission to collect and distribute knowledge. Google distributes pieces of that knowledge, but does not contribute to the collection of new knowledge.¹ Wikimedia has all the money it needs, and is getting more money from more people all the time. It does not have all the contributions it needs in the form of new knowledge, and by many measures the new knowledge it gets is decreasing.
tl;dr
The monetary cost does not really matter
1. It does contribute money, which Wikimedia does not need.
the decreasing number of edits likely has more to do with the obnoxious edit policies and power users who will stamp down on any new users trying to edit, rather than a few less pageviews directed from google search results.
I'm pretty confident only a small fraction of people edit anyway and those who would only need a few encounters to start becoming editors.
This is based off the fact that I frequently see:
- "why does X not have a Wikipedia article?"
- "this Wikipedia article is so poorly written"
And very rarely actually see someone edit it. On occasion thousands of people have agreed and hundreds of people have written comments agreeing and only two people edited.
So maybe it does some damage at the margin but overall probably doesn't hurt that much.
The Wikimedia Foundation has a mission of, in part, disseminating information. It's mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible." If the loss in donations allows for their mission to be done more efficiently then that's a net gain.
This is just a smokescreen. If we assume, very conservatively, that Wikipedia content outright satisfies 1% of Google searches (through info boxes, Wikipedia widget etc), thats would be worth 1% of $100bn+ of revenue Google generates from search = $1bn. Even if a fair thing to do would be to split that revenue, Wikipedia should still get $500mn in that arrangement. So a $2mn donation is just a smokescreen. Google is extracting extraordinary value from Wikipedia, and just because it is 'free' doesn't mean it shouldn't fairly give back.
Up until now, an edit was one click away. Now, it's not only one more click away but wikipedia has no way to communicate that editing the result is possible at all.
Do you refer to the markup jungle, or the VisualEditor? Because from the outside, the new editor looks fantastic, and honestly makes me want to self-host MediaWiki again.
Not to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF.
Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are a number of possible UX tweaks to improve reading and editing the encyclopedia, and these could all be helpful to the long term health of the encyclopedia (assuming they don't cut into the budget for servers).
I'm honestly glad to hear that. The main point of the Visual Editor was to make editing Wikipedia easier and more inclusive. The research suggests that it did not really succeed in achieving these goals. This result is a little surprising to me, but there are probably bigger barriers to editing wikipedia than a markup language.
For some people the visual editor is great, and I think that as a long term investment it was a good idea (the benefit could have been large) even though it did not pan out. The problem is that the cost and time spent creating it was very high, and the WMF foundation has a lousy track record executing these projects effectively.
VisualEditor is not worth it. It's being touted as a massive improvement, but which editors is it really catering too? Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway! The money could have been spent on an interactive markup tutorial instead. That would be way cheaper, because it has a linear flow. It would also have been easier because it isn't as performance critical, as it doesn't need to load millions of time per day, only as part of the onboarding process.
If you compare Wikimedias spending 5 years ago to what it is now, it has ballooned in such an excessive way if you put it in context. Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.
Surely it's "worth it" if you want the site to be usable by novice users. This is about optimizing for reach and intellectual diversity, not just "people who are currently adding value".
> Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.
Wikimedia supports other projects besides Wikipedia itself, and the value it provides has not just doubled but plausibly grown by an order of magnitude compared to its early days. Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are hugely beneficial to the Internet community, and Wikivoyage is not far behind.
> Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway!
Maybe this wouldn't be the case if pages were less complicated to edit?
